Filibuster isn’t normal politics

The GOP minority’s abuse of the filibuster underlies much of the U.S. Senate’s legislative paralysis, says Andrew Cohen at the Brennan Center for Justice. But sharing the blame, he says, is a press that treats this as “politics as usual” in its effort to appear unbiased.

ann – It is only wrong if it is being used as the only tool employed to constantly thwart the will of the majority (like the 90%+ of citizens demanding meaningful background checks for the guns that are killing so many of us). Your seven word and very edgariadite comment is illustrative of the politics of the absurd being played out on the Right, especially the Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and FOX Neus side of the equation.

No Ann, it’s abuse when one party makes it a matter of legislative policy to use a filibuster for each and every item on the agenda, including those with historical bipartisan support, those with overwhelming citizen support, and those that originated in their own party but with which the President stated agreement, in order to meet the publicly stated objective of seeing the President, a member of the other party, fail. And THAT is a policy that has risen to never before seen levels since Obama was elected.

Harry Reid isn’t blameless, though. After stating on record that the failure to do away with the “silent” filibuster was his biggest regret of the last session, to still not do so in this session when he could have done so makes him equally guilty of the abuse. He could have forced them to put up or shut up, (the way Rand Paul actually did put up a few weeks ago; I disagreed with his position, but I admired him doing the filibuster the traditional way), and he threw it away. He’s spineless.